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The Wild Laughter
It's 2008, and the Celtic Tiger has left devastation in its wake. Brothers Hart and Cormac Black are waking up to a very different Ireland – one that widens the chasm between them and brings their beloved father to his knees. Facing a devastating choice that risks their livelihood, if not their lives, their biggest danger comes when there is nothing to lose.
A sharp snapshot of a family and a nation suddenly unmoored, this epic-in-miniature explores cowardice and sacrifice, faith rewarded and abandoned, the stories we tell ourselves and the ones we resist. Hilarious, poignant and utterly fresh, The Wild Laughter cements Caoilinn Hughes' position as one of Ireland's most audacious, nuanced and insightful young writers.
A sharp snapshot of a family and a nation suddenly unmoored, this epic-in-miniature explores cowardice and sacrifice, faith rewarded and abandoned, the stories we tell ourselves and the ones we resist. Hilarious, poignant and utterly fresh, The Wild Laughter cements Caoilinn Hughes' position as one of Ireland's most audacious, nuanced and insightful young writers.
200 pages, Hardcover
First published June 18, 2020
110 people are currently reading
2413 people want to read
About the author
Caoilinn Hughes
8 books312 followersCaoilinn Hughes is the author of THE WILD LAUGHTER (2020), which won the Royal Society of Literature's Encore Award and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her first novel, ORCHID & THE WASP (2018) won the Collyer Bristow Prize and was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Her short stories have won the Irish Book Awards' Story of the Year, The Moth Short Story Prize, and an O.Henry Prize. She was recently Oscar Wilde Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin and a Cullman Center Fellow at New York Public Library. THE ALTERNATIVES (Riverhead/Oneworld 2024) is her third novel.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 194 reviews
September 3, 2020
EDIT: I've bumped this up to 5 stars. It’s better than many other books I've 5-starred this year.
The Wild Laughter has everything a great novel needs: memorable characters, high stakes drama, a distinctive voice, a very keen eye. Hughes’ energetic prose is delightfully astringent, like a good splash of cold water for your brain.
The story of an Irish farming family during the Celtic Tiger years and the crash that followed, Hughes’ novel highlights the high human cost of the economic downturn. A protracted illness, desperate measures, grief and guilt. The tangled, complex emotions of a family in extremis.
That sounds heavy, and it is, but not unremittingly so. Hughes manages it with a deftness of touch, with irony and spiky wit. The novel’s jabs of emotion are sharp and swift. It’s tempered with humour and arch turns of phrase, eg. the uncle with ‘a grin you might draw on a balloon’.
The final act moves from family drama to courtroom drama, as the consequences of the family’s actions catch up with them. This section has less of the black humour and tenderness—but it does nicely skewer the chess game that is ‘justice’ via the court system.
There’s something mythic about this tragic story. The hallmarks of ancient and classical tales are here: warring brothers, the rise and fall of their house, the once-proud patriarch brought low. If you told me this was a retelling of some ancient legend or Greek tragedy, I’d believe it. Tragicomic, moving and wise.
The Wild Laughter has everything a great novel needs: memorable characters, high stakes drama, a distinctive voice, a very keen eye. Hughes’ energetic prose is delightfully astringent, like a good splash of cold water for your brain.
The story of an Irish farming family during the Celtic Tiger years and the crash that followed, Hughes’ novel highlights the high human cost of the economic downturn. A protracted illness, desperate measures, grief and guilt. The tangled, complex emotions of a family in extremis.
That sounds heavy, and it is, but not unremittingly so. Hughes manages it with a deftness of touch, with irony and spiky wit. The novel’s jabs of emotion are sharp and swift. It’s tempered with humour and arch turns of phrase, eg. the uncle with ‘a grin you might draw on a balloon’.
The final act moves from family drama to courtroom drama, as the consequences of the family’s actions catch up with them. This section has less of the black humour and tenderness—but it does nicely skewer the chess game that is ‘justice’ via the court system.
There’s something mythic about this tragic story. The hallmarks of ancient and classical tales are here: warring brothers, the rise and fall of their house, the once-proud patriarch brought low. If you told me this was a retelling of some ancient legend or Greek tragedy, I’d believe it. Tragicomic, moving and wise.
May 22, 2021
Unsurprisingly now Winner of the RSL Encore award for second novels (see my closing sentence)
Caolinn Hughes is an award winning poet, novelist and short story writer.
Her debut novel “The Orchid and the Wasp” showed her talent and featured in Gael Foess a remarkable protagonist and a fascinating interaction with her brother Guthrie. In my review of that book I described Gael as “a self-willed force of nature, someone who does not so much break the rules as simply and casually change the rules to suit her and her ends and whose sheer self-believe enables her to deceive those around her who she views simply as means to those end” whereas Guthrie is a rather other worldly character. That book ranges across 2002-2011 and takes particular shape when Gael’s banker father walks out on the family in the 2008 crash.
In an interview around her debut novel, the author commented on Gael’s motivations "The fall of the Celtic Tiger was interesting for the way that this character understands how the world works. Because there was an onus taken on by Irish people, after the crash, and there was very much a sense of cultural acknowledgement of our own involvement and complicity. You know, "I should have known not to re-mortgage my house to buy that other property". This thing that, yes, the banks were to blame because they facilitated it, but we should've learnt where we came from. We should've learnt humility. We should've remembered how Ireland was 50, 70 years ago. And everyone, I think, was working through this on a spiritual level. That's what I think was unique with Ireland at that time.
And in a separate interview commented “Then at the end, it’s post-crash. I remember hearing people talking about getting a tombstone, and they’d been offered one that had the stonecutter’s email address on it for a big discount. That kind of negotiation hadn’t been going on. Nobody would have been spending their emotional energy on the mortification of having someone’s email address on their husband’s tombstone. That was heartbreaking, to see the embarrassment”.
This book I think draws very much on the same ideas – it is set around the same period, features two very different siblings, it has the exit of a father; it even has the stonecutter anecdote mentioned in the interview: but is I think more focused than its predecessor, which like many debut novels was a little too wide-ranging in plot.
The book is narrated by Hart Black, son of an Irish farmer (who he refers to as the Chief). Hart’s brother is Cormac and (in simple terms) Hart got the looks (and girls) and Cormac the brains (and sporting ability). The result is that while Cormac goes off to get an engineering degree, Hart naturally is left behind to work on the family farm.
Cormac’s intelligence leads him to sniff out opportunities for his hitherto cautious Father to sow into the Celtic Tiger boom,
Only to reap the bitter harvest of his over-leveraged position after the crash:
Something which (in a set piece scene I know many readers won’t like) leads Cormac and Hart into a rare co-operation on enacting a brutal revenge on a sheep farmer who lured the Chief into some ill-advised European property investments (Cormac’s own role seemingly overlooked).
In many ways Cormac is more like Gael (scheming and not always successfully) and Hart like Guthrie (more thoughtful) – their tensions coming out in their relationships with an actress Dolly.
The main part of the plot which is revealed from the first chapter is The Chief’s terminal illness and the decision of his family (Cormac, Hart and their mother Nora) to assist him in suicide – a decision which (via the intervention of the local priest) leads to them being out on trial, a trial which dominates the second half of the book and which also exposes the family dynamics.
I think the author’s strengths in other literary forms comes through strongly here, in snappy dialogue and descriptions
But overall this books works best as a black comedy – a comedy which examines the guilt of a nation at its own complicity in the downfall engineered on it by global finance. A guilt which is inevitably influenced by societal Catholicism and a complicity which has to be seen in the context of many years of occupation and repression – see Cormac’s quote). And all of this filtered through the lens of a family’s complicity in their own grief.
An excellent second novel.
My thanks to One World Publications for an ARC via NetGalley.
Determining the depth of rot that’s blackening the surface can’t always be left to deities or legislators—sometimes what’s needed is to tie a string around the tooth and shut the door lively.
Caolinn Hughes is an award winning poet, novelist and short story writer.
Her debut novel “The Orchid and the Wasp” showed her talent and featured in Gael Foess a remarkable protagonist and a fascinating interaction with her brother Guthrie. In my review of that book I described Gael as “a self-willed force of nature, someone who does not so much break the rules as simply and casually change the rules to suit her and her ends and whose sheer self-believe enables her to deceive those around her who she views simply as means to those end” whereas Guthrie is a rather other worldly character. That book ranges across 2002-2011 and takes particular shape when Gael’s banker father walks out on the family in the 2008 crash.
In an interview around her debut novel, the author commented on Gael’s motivations "The fall of the Celtic Tiger was interesting for the way that this character understands how the world works. Because there was an onus taken on by Irish people, after the crash, and there was very much a sense of cultural acknowledgement of our own involvement and complicity. You know, "I should have known not to re-mortgage my house to buy that other property". This thing that, yes, the banks were to blame because they facilitated it, but we should've learnt where we came from. We should've learnt humility. We should've remembered how Ireland was 50, 70 years ago. And everyone, I think, was working through this on a spiritual level. That's what I think was unique with Ireland at that time.
And in a separate interview commented “Then at the end, it’s post-crash. I remember hearing people talking about getting a tombstone, and they’d been offered one that had the stonecutter’s email address on it for a big discount. That kind of negotiation hadn’t been going on. Nobody would have been spending their emotional energy on the mortification of having someone’s email address on their husband’s tombstone. That was heartbreaking, to see the embarrassment”.
This book I think draws very much on the same ideas – it is set around the same period, features two very different siblings, it has the exit of a father; it even has the stonecutter anecdote mentioned in the interview: but is I think more focused than its predecessor, which like many debut novels was a little too wide-ranging in plot.
The book is narrated by Hart Black, son of an Irish farmer (who he refers to as the Chief). Hart’s brother is Cormac and (in simple terms) Hart got the looks (and girls) and Cormac the brains (and sporting ability). The result is that while Cormac goes off to get an engineering degree, Hart naturally is left behind to work on the family farm.
Cormac’s intelligence leads him to sniff out opportunities for his hitherto cautious Father to sow into the Celtic Tiger boom,
Cormac was off again, saying we were all so wet for buildings and holidays because any stunted eejit can understand them things, and the government could only fathom factories and stadiums besides—more of the same. There’s more helicopters in Ireland than high-speed modems. Yeah yeah yeah, it was normal to covet our own places after a century’s occupation, he said, but we’d need to get wise if all this luck wasn’t to be idled away. He flung his arms out to the fair, like a ringmaster whose arena encompasses the far reaches of the imagination. But he wasn’t imaginative. He was a ledger.
Only to reap the bitter harvest of his over-leveraged position after the crash:
But what did I know about economics? Only that it’s a creed we’re all baptised into against our will, and our heads can be pushed back underwater and held there if ever the fealty wavers..
Something which (in a set piece scene I know many readers won’t like) leads Cormac and Hart into a rare co-operation on enacting a brutal revenge on a sheep farmer who lured the Chief into some ill-advised European property investments (Cormac’s own role seemingly overlooked).
In many ways Cormac is more like Gael (scheming and not always successfully) and Hart like Guthrie (more thoughtful) – their tensions coming out in their relationships with an actress Dolly.
The main part of the plot which is revealed from the first chapter is The Chief’s terminal illness and the decision of his family (Cormac, Hart and their mother Nora) to assist him in suicide – a decision which (via the intervention of the local priest) leads to them being out on trial, a trial which dominates the second half of the book and which also exposes the family dynamics.
I think the author’s strengths in other literary forms comes through strongly here, in snappy dialogue and descriptions
conversing with fellas in pinstriped suits that weren’t even Adidas.
The waves pushed in a lip of scum for a reminder of the great chilling world that’s in it, full of razor clams and spiral conches people take home and hold up to their ears to remember their holidays.
But overall this books works best as a black comedy – a comedy which examines the guilt of a nation at its own complicity in the downfall engineered on it by global finance. A guilt which is inevitably influenced by societal Catholicism and a complicity which has to be seen in the context of many years of occupation and repression – see Cormac’s quote). And all of this filtered through the lens of a family’s complicity in their own grief.
The play that was on was a home-grown thing called Bailegangaire by a Galway sham, Tom Murphy. An baile gan gáire means ‘the town without laughter’ and what a title that was to make a man hold his breath. What a national Christening was that. The town, for we were only ever a town and nothing larger; the town without, for we were defined by what we weren’t—not married, not fertile, practising, prosperous, no longer political, no more brave rebels; the town without what? Without hope? We never needed hope to keep us going, keep us drinking. We never needed promises or prospects like the Yanks. No, no. What we could not be without is laughter—the thing austerity couldn’t touch. O-ho, the wild laughter! And what would we be without that but a grassland blackened by scarecrows, hoping the hooded game might hold off and not circle down on us as they’d done long ago, hoping they’d stay in the sky like old-fashioned film credits, gliding an eternal acknowledging script.
An excellent second novel.
My thanks to One World Publications for an ARC via NetGalley.
September 3, 2020
Caoilinn Hughes, ah how good is this ! and why have I not read Orchid & the Wasp already. I guess it is tempting to say if you like Kevin Barry then this is your next stop. But Hughes is carving out her own stylistic path here which I describe as darkly ornate with a patina of melancholic dry-wit.
The writing here is some of the best I have read this year, incredible for a second novel. Beautiful, beguiling prose poetry shaped around a harrowing tale of assisted suicide and the "Celtic Tiger".
Reading this novel wasn't easy for me. But I begrudge it nothing. There is a fair amount of Irish vernacular to navigate, coupled with the elaborate little journeys you go on with each paragraph. It demands close, slow reading to get the most out of it. Close, slow reading about a terminally ill parent was a tough book for me to let myself emotionally engage with. I had to set it aside every so often. While there is plenty of that charming Irish wit to enjoy and an almost infectious delight with language, this remained for me a moody and by the end, gloomy family tale.
This is one of those categories of novel that I will eventually reread. I retain this lingering feeling that I am not, as yet, a savvy enough reader to appreciate everything that Hughes has accomplished here.
Edited: This review needed quotes, here are three good-uns ;
His mind was a luxury. The face was rationed, it must be said, but there’s not a body with everything. Part t-Rex, part pelican. Imagine that menace of features.
That’s the way the world felt - as a post we were hung from, and no one willing to say who fixed the meat hook into the decade.
they were shooting the bullet points of their adult lives at each other, hoping one of them wasn’t a blank. Brian had no hope, his weapon banjaxed to begin with.
The writing here is some of the best I have read this year, incredible for a second novel. Beautiful, beguiling prose poetry shaped around a harrowing tale of assisted suicide and the "Celtic Tiger".
Reading this novel wasn't easy for me. But I begrudge it nothing. There is a fair amount of Irish vernacular to navigate, coupled with the elaborate little journeys you go on with each paragraph. It demands close, slow reading to get the most out of it. Close, slow reading about a terminally ill parent was a tough book for me to let myself emotionally engage with. I had to set it aside every so often. While there is plenty of that charming Irish wit to enjoy and an almost infectious delight with language, this remained for me a moody and by the end, gloomy family tale.
This is one of those categories of novel that I will eventually reread. I retain this lingering feeling that I am not, as yet, a savvy enough reader to appreciate everything that Hughes has accomplished here.
Edited: This review needed quotes, here are three good-uns ;
His mind was a luxury. The face was rationed, it must be said, but there’s not a body with everything. Part t-Rex, part pelican. Imagine that menace of features.
That’s the way the world felt - as a post we were hung from, and no one willing to say who fixed the meat hook into the decade.
they were shooting the bullet points of their adult lives at each other, hoping one of them wasn’t a blank. Brian had no hope, his weapon banjaxed to begin with.
September 6, 2020
Marvelous, absolutely marvelous. I've been closely, perhaps obsessively, following the Bookers since the early '70s. I appreciate the near impossible mission that confronts the judges every year, and I try to refrain from second guessing them. But they missed the mark this year by omitting The Wild Laughter and Olive, Again, both of which are surely shortlist worthy in an otherwise excellent Booker longlist year.
September 2, 2020
I always go into every book hoping it’ll be great, looking for what’s good about it, trying to ignore the things I dislike, focusing on the positives. This can be tricky. It also often means that, when I find a book I love, when a book hammers my sweet spot with such surprising and constant (and almost alarming, almost wearying, as though the author has worryingly understood exactly what I want from a novel at all points; almost enough for it to begin to feel a bit uncanny) accuracy that I’m completely disarmed, I have to be careful when offering any subsequent assessment since it can potentially devolve to sycophantic guff in no time at all and become worthlessly insensible gushing.
I loved The Wild Laughter. I’ve left things a couple of days and just now gone back over certain passages, then riffled the book to land on random paragraphs. (I had serious trouble parsing bits that I might excerpt: I eventually gave up.) The book is still very much what I thought it was. It’s uniformly exceptional, unquestionably brilliant, at different times reminding this reader of (honestly: this is why I left it a couple of days to make sure) Muriel Spark, Martin McDonagh, Anne Enright, Sebastian and Kevin Barry, Nicola Barker, Angela Carter, Joanna Scott, Flann O’Brien and Beryl Bainbridge. That it intermittently resembles such calibre of wry litterateur might suggest that it’s funny, and it is, but like those esteemed authors (the ranks of which this one will soon join) Caoilinn Hughes harnesses her black comedy to poignant, substantive, powerful effect. It’s wild, often instinctive and inappropriate, at times precision-tooled-for-withering-effect laughter in the dark, mirth culled at great expense from a tar pit of national and familial tragedy.
On a sentence level it’s as good as anything else you’ll read published this year – which makes it a slow-burn, impossible to race through; but these are masterful sentences to be savoured as the regularly grim yet gripping tale glacially unwinds. If I told you there are long stretches about farming and potatoes and yet the book is completely thrilling for all its 198 pages, would you believe that I’m over the spell it cast? I could read it again right now. Maybe I’m not.
---
We settled down then and Cormac took a page he’d torn from the Bible from the breast pocket of his jacket. ‘So,’ I said. ‘Is it acceptable to hang yourself, if you do it with a string of rosary beads?’
Cormac took the drink mat from under his pint and began tearing it. ‘Brutal thing to ask me to do.’
‘Would he ask if he wasn’t desperate?’
‘The fuck do I know if Heaven lets you top yourself? The fuck do I care?’
‘Don’t waste your time with it,’ I said. ‘I googled it and there’s only a few vague things in the Bible to do with suicide, so we’ll tell him there’s fuck all. The point is, you know as well as I do, he wasn’t asking for an essay on holy allowances. It’s him warning us, of his mindset.’ Cormac downed a quarter of his pint. A silence went on long enough for us to make out the music playing.
It was your man from Led Zeppelin talking bollocks, singing about a train rolling down the track. Sure, trains don’t roll down tracks. They’re moved by way of energy transference. They’re pushed.
‘You think he was warning us?’ Cormac said, flicking his pile of shredded cardboard. It was strange having him vulnerable to my knowledge. I swallowed the rest of my pint in one.
‘Whether he was or he wasn’t—’ I caught my breath ‘—that’s no ending for our father. Neither is vomiting the content of his bowels, which is the way it’ll go, with the secondary. Vomiting faeces or coughing up a lung in bits and pieces. Neither of them are options for the Chief. Nor is stringing himself to the shed rafters.’ Cormac looked up at me. What’s that you’re saying? I gave him a minute, then pulled a wad of paper from my pocket and laid it down. ‘If he’s away off, we’ll help him leave standing up. We’ll administer euthanasia.’ I had practised that line many times, but the words still felt extreme. They were culpable words fit for the booth we were tucked in. The probability sums of the universe threw us an eight ball then, and Zeppelin belted out a plea to the hangman to hold it awhile. He offered all kind of bribes to fend off the gallows pole, including sex acts with his sister, which was fucken odd to say the least and ruined the vibe, to be honest. Brian arrived to clear our glasses. I thought the song might give us away.
I loved The Wild Laughter. I’ve left things a couple of days and just now gone back over certain passages, then riffled the book to land on random paragraphs. (I had serious trouble parsing bits that I might excerpt: I eventually gave up.) The book is still very much what I thought it was. It’s uniformly exceptional, unquestionably brilliant, at different times reminding this reader of (honestly: this is why I left it a couple of days to make sure) Muriel Spark, Martin McDonagh, Anne Enright, Sebastian and Kevin Barry, Nicola Barker, Angela Carter, Joanna Scott, Flann O’Brien and Beryl Bainbridge. That it intermittently resembles such calibre of wry litterateur might suggest that it’s funny, and it is, but like those esteemed authors (the ranks of which this one will soon join) Caoilinn Hughes harnesses her black comedy to poignant, substantive, powerful effect. It’s wild, often instinctive and inappropriate, at times precision-tooled-for-withering-effect laughter in the dark, mirth culled at great expense from a tar pit of national and familial tragedy.
On a sentence level it’s as good as anything else you’ll read published this year – which makes it a slow-burn, impossible to race through; but these are masterful sentences to be savoured as the regularly grim yet gripping tale glacially unwinds. If I told you there are long stretches about farming and potatoes and yet the book is completely thrilling for all its 198 pages, would you believe that I’m over the spell it cast? I could read it again right now. Maybe I’m not.
---
We settled down then and Cormac took a page he’d torn from the Bible from the breast pocket of his jacket. ‘So,’ I said. ‘Is it acceptable to hang yourself, if you do it with a string of rosary beads?’
Cormac took the drink mat from under his pint and began tearing it. ‘Brutal thing to ask me to do.’
‘Would he ask if he wasn’t desperate?’
‘The fuck do I know if Heaven lets you top yourself? The fuck do I care?’
‘Don’t waste your time with it,’ I said. ‘I googled it and there’s only a few vague things in the Bible to do with suicide, so we’ll tell him there’s fuck all. The point is, you know as well as I do, he wasn’t asking for an essay on holy allowances. It’s him warning us, of his mindset.’ Cormac downed a quarter of his pint. A silence went on long enough for us to make out the music playing.
It was your man from Led Zeppelin talking bollocks, singing about a train rolling down the track. Sure, trains don’t roll down tracks. They’re moved by way of energy transference. They’re pushed.
‘You think he was warning us?’ Cormac said, flicking his pile of shredded cardboard. It was strange having him vulnerable to my knowledge. I swallowed the rest of my pint in one.
‘Whether he was or he wasn’t—’ I caught my breath ‘—that’s no ending for our father. Neither is vomiting the content of his bowels, which is the way it’ll go, with the secondary. Vomiting faeces or coughing up a lung in bits and pieces. Neither of them are options for the Chief. Nor is stringing himself to the shed rafters.’ Cormac looked up at me. What’s that you’re saying? I gave him a minute, then pulled a wad of paper from my pocket and laid it down. ‘If he’s away off, we’ll help him leave standing up. We’ll administer euthanasia.’ I had practised that line many times, but the words still felt extreme. They were culpable words fit for the booth we were tucked in. The probability sums of the universe threw us an eight ball then, and Zeppelin belted out a plea to the hangman to hold it awhile. He offered all kind of bribes to fend off the gallows pole, including sex acts with his sister, which was fucken odd to say the least and ruined the vibe, to be honest. Brian arrived to clear our glasses. I thought the song might give us away.
July 2, 2020
My first introduction to Caoilinn Hughes’s writing and I absolutely loved the experience; in fact I ordered a copy of her debut novel before I’d even finished reading this!
The setting is rural Ireland in 2008, the country left financially devastated by the Celtic Tiger. Hart and his brother Cormac are struggling to come to terms with what this means for their future as a farming family, and on top of that their father’s health is worsening. I think this is best read knowing little more about the plot, but rest assured the story could not be more engaging and morally complex.
Hughes deftly handles this novel of family relations: the writing is fantastic, the story emotive and the dialogue and internal thoughts of the characters ring completely true. I can’t extol the virtues of this any more, and The Wild Laughter deserves to win all manner of prizes - it’ll definitely be on my personal list of top reads of 2020.
Thank you Netgalley and Oneworld Publications for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review.
The setting is rural Ireland in 2008, the country left financially devastated by the Celtic Tiger. Hart and his brother Cormac are struggling to come to terms with what this means for their future as a farming family, and on top of that their father’s health is worsening. I think this is best read knowing little more about the plot, but rest assured the story could not be more engaging and morally complex.
Hughes deftly handles this novel of family relations: the writing is fantastic, the story emotive and the dialogue and internal thoughts of the characters ring completely true. I can’t extol the virtues of this any more, and The Wild Laughter deserves to win all manner of prizes - it’ll definitely be on my personal list of top reads of 2020.
Thank you Netgalley and Oneworld Publications for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review.
July 14, 2020
When I received The Wild Laughter, I was in the middle of reading Caoilinn Hughes’ debut novel, Orchid and the Wasp and what struck me was the style of writing. It was filled with offbeat puns, interesting cadences and sly observations. I have never left a novel halfway through but I was eager to see how Caoilinn Hughes’ unique voice would work in a shorter format.
Wild Laughter focuses on Ireland during the recession of 2008. The main protagonists are a farming family called the Blacks ; Manus nicknamed the Chief, Cormac, the brains of the family, Hart, who has the looks and the brawn and Norà, their mother. Throughout his life Manus has made some mistakes with property. As Cormac is at university it is expected of Hart to take over the farm.
Things get complicated though the Chief falls ill and Hart has to see his suffering and at the same time he and his brother are battling it out over the same partner. Eventually Manus has a request which puts the boys in an uncomfortable spot.
The Wild Laughter is essentially about family dynamics ; sibling relationships vs parental ones. It’s also about a changing Ireland where old fashioned ideals are being challenged by new ones. As I’m not Irish I’m sure there were some cultural references which I did not get which would emerge after a reread (yes that’s definitely going to happen). There’s a lot of symbolism within the novel from the character’s names (manus = king) to the Gaelic phrases and names which pepper the novel.
The book is bleak, yet it is also funny. Hart’s observations and similes are fantastic. There’s also a court case (it’s worth the price of the book alone) and Cormac’s retorts verge on the unacceptable but I couldn’t stop grinning. However do not think this is a laugh riot it’s more akin to witty comebacks accompanied with a smirk.
Like Anna Burns and Eimear McBride, Caoilinn Hughes is also giving Irish literature an unforgettable voice while tackling serious issues at the same time. Definitely style and substance.
Wild Laughter focuses on Ireland during the recession of 2008. The main protagonists are a farming family called the Blacks ; Manus nicknamed the Chief, Cormac, the brains of the family, Hart, who has the looks and the brawn and Norà, their mother. Throughout his life Manus has made some mistakes with property. As Cormac is at university it is expected of Hart to take over the farm.
Things get complicated though the Chief falls ill and Hart has to see his suffering and at the same time he and his brother are battling it out over the same partner. Eventually Manus has a request which puts the boys in an uncomfortable spot.
The Wild Laughter is essentially about family dynamics ; sibling relationships vs parental ones. It’s also about a changing Ireland where old fashioned ideals are being challenged by new ones. As I’m not Irish I’m sure there were some cultural references which I did not get which would emerge after a reread (yes that’s definitely going to happen). There’s a lot of symbolism within the novel from the character’s names (manus = king) to the Gaelic phrases and names which pepper the novel.
The book is bleak, yet it is also funny. Hart’s observations and similes are fantastic. There’s also a court case (it’s worth the price of the book alone) and Cormac’s retorts verge on the unacceptable but I couldn’t stop grinning. However do not think this is a laugh riot it’s more akin to witty comebacks accompanied with a smirk.
Like Anna Burns and Eimear McBride, Caoilinn Hughes is also giving Irish literature an unforgettable voice while tackling serious issues at the same time. Definitely style and substance.
June 5, 2020
What to say about this brilliant gut punch of a novel?
The Wild Laughter is a 200-page novel with the depth of a veritable tome. It moves assuredly and precisely, taking you further into the family dynamics of the Black family and the financial and physical decline of its patriarch. What strikes me most about this novel is how compassionately it treats its characters. They are all deeply flawed, at times seeming to be beyond redemption, but there is always a little detail that Hughes introduces that forces you to recalibrate, reevaluate who you had perhaps pegged them as. And as much as you get to intimately know these characters, especially the narrator, Hart, they are also characters who aren't fully knowable. There are questions about them that remain unanswered, even by the end of the novel.
What makes all the above possible is Hughes's brilliant writing; it immediately lays the ground onto which this novel so confidently steps from page one. I mean, how can you resist a novel whose first chapter is this:
The only thing that marred this otherwise impressive novel is its protagonist's treatment of women. It went beyond casual sexism and objectification and into potentially more violent territory sometimes, and it bothered me. I didn't get why it was there, and why it was never addressed.
Thank you to Oneworld Publications for providing me with an e-ARC of this via NetGalley!
The Wild Laughter is a 200-page novel with the depth of a veritable tome. It moves assuredly and precisely, taking you further into the family dynamics of the Black family and the financial and physical decline of its patriarch. What strikes me most about this novel is how compassionately it treats its characters. They are all deeply flawed, at times seeming to be beyond redemption, but there is always a little detail that Hughes introduces that forces you to recalibrate, reevaluate who you had perhaps pegged them as. And as much as you get to intimately know these characters, especially the narrator, Hart, they are also characters who aren't fully knowable. There are questions about them that remain unanswered, even by the end of the novel.
What makes all the above possible is Hughes's brilliant writing; it immediately lays the ground onto which this novel so confidently steps from page one. I mean, how can you resist a novel whose first chapter is this:
The night the chief died, I lost my father and the country lost a battle it wouldn't confess to be fighting. For the no-collared, labouring class. For the decent, dependable patriarch. For right of entry from the field into the garden.
Jurors were appointed to gauge the casualty. They didn't weal black. Don't they know black is flattering? The truth isn't. They kept safe and silent. I didn't. When is a confession an absolution and when it is a sentencing, I'd like to find out. I suppose there's only one outcome for souls like us--heavy-going souls the like of mine and the long-lost Chief's--and not a good one.
But I'll lay it on the line, if only to remind the People of who they are: a far cry from neutral judicial equipment. Determining the depth of rot that's blackening the surface can't always be left to deities or legislators--sometimes what's needed is to tie a string around the tooth and shut the door lively.
The only thing that marred this otherwise impressive novel is its protagonist's treatment of women. It went beyond casual sexism and objectification and into potentially more violent territory sometimes, and it bothered me. I didn't get why it was there, and why it was never addressed.
Thank you to Oneworld Publications for providing me with an e-ARC of this via NetGalley!
July 7, 2020
I mean, wow. What a talent.
There's a temptation to compare Caoilinn Hughes with other ludicrously talented Irish writers of the current generation - the proof copy I read was plastered with quotes from Kevin Barry, Sebastian Barry and John Banville, among others. And her inventive, brave prose style does have similarities with the likes of Barry (Kevin).
But, reading this quite brilliant novel, I was most reminded of the great writers of the American South. Religion, warring brothers, a bitter matriarch, a fallen hero patriarch, crime and punishment - all set in a rural, farming community beset by economic problems, history of famine and an uncertain future. What about that doesn't scream Faulkner, McCarthy, Steinbeck or McCullers?
Hughes blends a distinctive, challenging storytelling voice with a gripping and dark family story. There are elements of humour, too, but they are as black as the clouds which threaten rain so often in this bleak corner of Ireland.
If Faulkner were alive today, this is the kind of rich, daring, contemporary fable he'd be weaving. It is masterly.
There's a temptation to compare Caoilinn Hughes with other ludicrously talented Irish writers of the current generation - the proof copy I read was plastered with quotes from Kevin Barry, Sebastian Barry and John Banville, among others. And her inventive, brave prose style does have similarities with the likes of Barry (Kevin).
But, reading this quite brilliant novel, I was most reminded of the great writers of the American South. Religion, warring brothers, a bitter matriarch, a fallen hero patriarch, crime and punishment - all set in a rural, farming community beset by economic problems, history of famine and an uncertain future. What about that doesn't scream Faulkner, McCarthy, Steinbeck or McCullers?
Hughes blends a distinctive, challenging storytelling voice with a gripping and dark family story. There are elements of humour, too, but they are as black as the clouds which threaten rain so often in this bleak corner of Ireland.
If Faulkner were alive today, this is the kind of rich, daring, contemporary fable he'd be weaving. It is masterly.
July 13, 2020
4.5, rounded up
June 10, 2020
I was a huge fan of Caoilinn Hughes’ first novel, The Orchid and the Wasp, last year so was excited to see what she tackled next. Very different subject matter here, but her sublime writing and creation of fully rounded, warts-and-all, memorable characters are undiminished. This is a devastating story of a farming family in crisis, the father over-extending and then losing everything in the financial crash in Ireland, then brought to breaking point through illness and despair. We see two brothers engaged in a life-long duel (an unforgivable simplification, but one is a brash, go-getting type, absenting himself when the going gets tough, the other the dutiful son who hangs in there) and their responses to their parents’ dilemma. A sad, sad story of love, responsibility, and faith tested to the extreme, it is intense and completely immersive for the reader. Fabulous writing, I could quote a brilliant turn of phrase from every page and all of Dolly’s wonderful letters, but a couple of examples that stood out for me:
That’s what I saw I the mirror. My impotent, hairless, slackened, orphan self. The mirror was the way of my recalibration. It was wojous as an AA shindig or an AA bra tag on the unpinging.
Just then, Shane tried to slink in rat-like at the back, but all the faces staring doorward made a hedgehog of him.
A terrific read, I couldn’t recommend it more highly.
With thanks to Oneworld via NetGalley for the opportunity to read an ARC.
That’s what I saw I the mirror. My impotent, hairless, slackened, orphan self. The mirror was the way of my recalibration. It was wojous as an AA shindig or an AA bra tag on the unpinging.
Just then, Shane tried to slink in rat-like at the back, but all the faces staring doorward made a hedgehog of him.
A terrific read, I couldn’t recommend it more highly.
With thanks to Oneworld via NetGalley for the opportunity to read an ARC.
June 30, 2021
By pure coincidence this is the second of three consecutive books I have been reading set in rural Ireland - as one would expect given the age of the writer this one is by far the most contemporary of the three, and stands up pretty well to the likes of Dermot Healy and Niall Williams. For Hughes, rural Ireland in the aftermath of the "Celtic Tiger" boom is no idyll, and its narrator Hart (Doharty) Black embodies much of what went wrong.
Hart is the younger of two sons of a small farmer who has been ruined by an ill-advised investment during the boom. The elder brother Cormac is an opportunist who has escaped the farm via a college education, leaving Hart, who dreams of travel and escape, to care for the dying father and their mother. Neither brother is entirely likeable, but by the end Hart cuts an increasingly tragic figure. For all of that, there is plenty of dark humour, and the book is a very enjoyable read.
Hart is the younger of two sons of a small farmer who has been ruined by an ill-advised investment during the boom. The elder brother Cormac is an opportunist who has escaped the farm via a college education, leaving Hart, who dreams of travel and escape, to care for the dying father and their mother. Neither brother is entirely likeable, but by the end Hart cuts an increasingly tragic figure. For all of that, there is plenty of dark humour, and the book is a very enjoyable read.
July 7, 2020
This book is a superb exposition of modern Ireland (set in Roscommon), written in a hard prose style that does not over romanticise the rural idyll. The iron grip of the Roman Catholic Church is very much in evidence in this contemporary (2015) setting.I don't know Ireland well but I ended this book with a better grasp for the pulse of the nation. The book is funny and sad by turns. There is cunning, erudition, and youthful disregard for tradition, its a book full of surprises.
Synopsis
A number of interwoven themes play out in a densely packed two hundred pages.
• Assisted end of life (euthanasia)
• Sibling love and rivalry
• Family dynamics
• The effects of national economic recession (especially hard on the heels of boom times). This is set in Ireland, one of the most dramatic examples of boom followed by bust.
The Black family is a patriarchal family dominated by Manus (or ‘Chief’). The two sons are not driven by the desire to take over the reins of the family farm, and in Doharty and Cormac, the aspirations of contemporary Ireland are reflected in business, the Arts and in language. The boys are different, between them there is a love/hate dynamic; both are young men (in their late teens/early twenties) and make a big impression on those that they meet. The description of Cormac’s relationship with his mother (Nora) through the book is masterful. He brings a few small gifts from time to time, and in return he is the prodigal son who can walk on water in his mother’s eyes.
The plot centers around the terminal illness of Chief and the awful dilemma faced by many families of accommodating the law, the pain and suffering, and what the scriptures suggest and allow. The act of suicide was decriminalised in Ireland in 1993 but it remained an offence to assist or attempt to assist another person to do so. Euthanasia is regarded as either manslaughter or murder and is punishable by up to life imprisonment. Just as The Wild Laughter is set in 2015 the shaping and defining law on assisted dying in Ireland was played out for real in Ireland in the same year when Gail O’Rorke was accused of attempting to help a friend with multiple sclerosis take her own life.
Euthanasia hardly makes for uplifting subject, but while the book is not a light hearted or superficial account of such weighty matters, nor is it intense or polemical. The brothers Hart and Cormac are suffused with great humour (though as a reader it is sometimes strange to feel yourself hoping for the best for Hart). Best of all is the character of Dolly (or more accurately Aleabh Cullinane). The contrast with this young(ish) woman and Nora Black could not be more marked. To read Dolly’s correspondence is to recall fondly the days of letter writing.
The love affair between Hart and Dolly is written in the style of James Joyce and not of Jane Austen. Let’s just say that you need to turn to The Urban Dictionary to understand the full range of applications for Deep Heat (and not the manufacturer, Mentholatum).
Highlights
• The Finale.I don’t especially reads books in the hope that there will be a wrap up ending that answers questions or that provides a neat explanation of what I have just read. The Wild Laughter does have a great ending though (no spoilers here).
• Gaeilgeoir (Irish speaking), the Irish voice and aisling poetry. Caoilinn Hughes is herself a poet and this is apparent in the references to Irish poets and playwrights, throughout the book. Patrick Kavanagh (the Great Hunger) “We will wait and watch the tragedy to the last curtain” (10); Brian Friel (Philadelphia Here I Come. The lyrical feel of the prose is enhanced by the inclusion of gaelic words and phrases for emphasis (some given an English translation) all of which adds impact and extra authenticity.
• Hart suffers from a fear of dogs.. This is a theme with recurs throughout the book and I was interested to see that this is a condition with a sufficient number of phobics that it even has its own name: Cynophobia
• Hughes writes female and male characters with equal conviction. Her description of the male sibling rivalry is spot on, and the portrayal of a certain type of male ‘courtship’ is strikingly accurate.
Historical & Literary
As Hart and Dolly get to know each other there is great cultural diversity facilitating the meeting of their minds (and bodies): “ Feminism: Caryl Churchill; Socialism: Sean O’Casey & George Bernard Shaw; Cruelty: Antonin Artaud; Sexuality :Marquis de Sade; Disenfranchisement :John Osborne; (E)strangement: Bertolt Brecht” (55/56)
Questions
There are numerous passages whose immediate meaning is unclear. That’s not a bad thing in the context of this thought provoking book. Sometimes there is a later reveal of a subject introduced subtly (“take a stick”); at other times it remains obscure, but mostly the ambiguity is fascinating and not frustrating. There’s a density to this writing which will reward a revisit.
• Two chapters are deliberately short, punchy and oblique:
1. “ I hadn't heard Cormac pull up, with the Chiefs hand on my ear, but I did hear the door shut loudly” (91)
2. ”I wrote back” (173)
• Seaweed and bin bags?
• An adopted hare returns with its mate
• The book cover. Hughes acknowledges the artist Ben Summers “for this perfect cover”. I was puzzled by the cover coming after the beauty of The Orchid and the Wasp. This is a deliberately stark black/white
Author background & Reviews
Caoilinn Hughes debut novel was the excellent The Orchid and the Wasp , a book with some similarities in its backdrop as the “Celtic Tiger” ( “unearned, unnecessary and neglected” ) loses its potency.
Recommend
This book is a beautiful mixture of resigned humour and the serious, and sad consequences of well-intentioned love running out of control. Caoilinn Hughes writes in an earthy vernacular style , enlivened by subtle references to the influences that make Ireland in the c.21st what it is. I recommend the book highly and would love to see it garlanded with selection for some of the literature prizes in the coming year.
Synopsis
A number of interwoven themes play out in a densely packed two hundred pages.
• Assisted end of life (euthanasia)
• Sibling love and rivalry
• Family dynamics
• The effects of national economic recession (especially hard on the heels of boom times). This is set in Ireland, one of the most dramatic examples of boom followed by bust.
The Black family is a patriarchal family dominated by Manus (or ‘Chief’). The two sons are not driven by the desire to take over the reins of the family farm, and in Doharty and Cormac, the aspirations of contemporary Ireland are reflected in business, the Arts and in language. The boys are different, between them there is a love/hate dynamic; both are young men (in their late teens/early twenties) and make a big impression on those that they meet. The description of Cormac’s relationship with his mother (Nora) through the book is masterful. He brings a few small gifts from time to time, and in return he is the prodigal son who can walk on water in his mother’s eyes.
The plot centers around the terminal illness of Chief and the awful dilemma faced by many families of accommodating the law, the pain and suffering, and what the scriptures suggest and allow. The act of suicide was decriminalised in Ireland in 1993 but it remained an offence to assist or attempt to assist another person to do so. Euthanasia is regarded as either manslaughter or murder and is punishable by up to life imprisonment. Just as The Wild Laughter is set in 2015 the shaping and defining law on assisted dying in Ireland was played out for real in Ireland in the same year when Gail O’Rorke was accused of attempting to help a friend with multiple sclerosis take her own life.
Euthanasia hardly makes for uplifting subject, but while the book is not a light hearted or superficial account of such weighty matters, nor is it intense or polemical. The brothers Hart and Cormac are suffused with great humour (though as a reader it is sometimes strange to feel yourself hoping for the best for Hart). Best of all is the character of Dolly (or more accurately Aleabh Cullinane). The contrast with this young(ish) woman and Nora Black could not be more marked. To read Dolly’s correspondence is to recall fondly the days of letter writing.
The love affair between Hart and Dolly is written in the style of James Joyce and not of Jane Austen. Let’s just say that you need to turn to The Urban Dictionary to understand the full range of applications for Deep Heat (and not the manufacturer, Mentholatum).
Highlights
• The Finale.I don’t especially reads books in the hope that there will be a wrap up ending that answers questions or that provides a neat explanation of what I have just read. The Wild Laughter does have a great ending though (no spoilers here).
• Gaeilgeoir (Irish speaking), the Irish voice and aisling poetry. Caoilinn Hughes is herself a poet and this is apparent in the references to Irish poets and playwrights, throughout the book. Patrick Kavanagh (the Great Hunger) “We will wait and watch the tragedy to the last curtain” (10); Brian Friel (Philadelphia Here I Come. The lyrical feel of the prose is enhanced by the inclusion of gaelic words and phrases for emphasis (some given an English translation) all of which adds impact and extra authenticity.
• Hart suffers from a fear of dogs.. This is a theme with recurs throughout the book and I was interested to see that this is a condition with a sufficient number of phobics that it even has its own name: Cynophobia
• Hughes writes female and male characters with equal conviction. Her description of the male sibling rivalry is spot on, and the portrayal of a certain type of male ‘courtship’ is strikingly accurate.
Historical & Literary
As Hart and Dolly get to know each other there is great cultural diversity facilitating the meeting of their minds (and bodies): “ Feminism: Caryl Churchill; Socialism: Sean O’Casey & George Bernard Shaw; Cruelty: Antonin Artaud; Sexuality :Marquis de Sade; Disenfranchisement :John Osborne; (E)strangement: Bertolt Brecht” (55/56)
Questions
There are numerous passages whose immediate meaning is unclear. That’s not a bad thing in the context of this thought provoking book. Sometimes there is a later reveal of a subject introduced subtly (“take a stick”); at other times it remains obscure, but mostly the ambiguity is fascinating and not frustrating. There’s a density to this writing which will reward a revisit.
• Two chapters are deliberately short, punchy and oblique:
1. “ I hadn't heard Cormac pull up, with the Chiefs hand on my ear, but I did hear the door shut loudly” (91)
2. ”I wrote back” (173)
• Seaweed and bin bags?
• An adopted hare returns with its mate
• The book cover. Hughes acknowledges the artist Ben Summers “for this perfect cover”. I was puzzled by the cover coming after the beauty of The Orchid and the Wasp. This is a deliberately stark black/white
Author background & Reviews
Caoilinn Hughes debut novel was the excellent The Orchid and the Wasp , a book with some similarities in its backdrop as the “Celtic Tiger” ( “unearned, unnecessary and neglected” ) loses its potency.
Recommend
This book is a beautiful mixture of resigned humour and the serious, and sad consequences of well-intentioned love running out of control. Caoilinn Hughes writes in an earthy vernacular style , enlivened by subtle references to the influences that make Ireland in the c.21st what it is. I recommend the book highly and would love to see it garlanded with selection for some of the literature prizes in the coming year.
February 28, 2022
Well.
I don’t know what I expected, exactly, but not this.
Look, it’s an excellent book. Hughes is a very talented wordsmith. It’s hard work, all the Irish vernacular (and I don’t usually struggle with that). It can be oblique, hard to know what’s going on. But impeccably written. Sentences that need lots of unpacking. A bit heavy on the fancy descriptions sometimes, but other times just right. Funny. Really funny, in an incredibly bracing way.
For example, a son realizes how ill his father is:
Then Cormac was awakened to it. The strangeness of a patient man, composed as a pillar, now irritable as a teenager. The side effects of chronic opioids: nausea, itching, slow breathing, tiredness, constipation, low tolerance; cumulus, cirrus, cirrocumulus, altocumulus, altostratus, stratocumulus – the ways of the clouds were the ways of his condition. You could see there was rain in him, but would it arrive before the washing was in off the line?
This is the darkest book I’ve read this year, but it’s not unremittingly bleak. Barring a few moments, it doesn’t have any of that gratuitous violence that I find in so many contemporary novels. It’s more of a classical tragedy, with betrayal the order of the day, and extreme violence to the psyche told in a very deadpan way.
There’s also a scene in a confession box in which a priest confesses that I’ll not be forgetting any time soon.
I was really considering five stars but I can’t quite do it. In part because I was not expecting the book to be about what it turned out to be about (helping a terminally ill parent to suicide and a resulting courtroom drama) and to be honest it wasn’t a topic I really wanted to read about, and in part because a few things failed to take off (the courtroom drama, for example, is filled with marvellous characters but they ultimately weren’t given enough to do). Something just felt a little unbalanced. And I'm not sure I entirely understood what happened at the end. The obliqueness again.
But this is a very impressive not-perfect book. I’m looking forward to whatever the next one is.
I don’t know what I expected, exactly, but not this.
Look, it’s an excellent book. Hughes is a very talented wordsmith. It’s hard work, all the Irish vernacular (and I don’t usually struggle with that). It can be oblique, hard to know what’s going on. But impeccably written. Sentences that need lots of unpacking. A bit heavy on the fancy descriptions sometimes, but other times just right. Funny. Really funny, in an incredibly bracing way.
For example, a son realizes how ill his father is:
Then Cormac was awakened to it. The strangeness of a patient man, composed as a pillar, now irritable as a teenager. The side effects of chronic opioids: nausea, itching, slow breathing, tiredness, constipation, low tolerance; cumulus, cirrus, cirrocumulus, altocumulus, altostratus, stratocumulus – the ways of the clouds were the ways of his condition. You could see there was rain in him, but would it arrive before the washing was in off the line?
This is the darkest book I’ve read this year, but it’s not unremittingly bleak. Barring a few moments, it doesn’t have any of that gratuitous violence that I find in so many contemporary novels. It’s more of a classical tragedy, with betrayal the order of the day, and extreme violence to the psyche told in a very deadpan way.
There’s also a scene in a confession box in which a priest confesses that I’ll not be forgetting any time soon.
I was really considering five stars but I can’t quite do it. In part because I was not expecting the book to be about what it turned out to be about (helping a terminally ill parent to suicide and a resulting courtroom drama) and to be honest it wasn’t a topic I really wanted to read about, and in part because a few things failed to take off (the courtroom drama, for example, is filled with marvellous characters but they ultimately weren’t given enough to do). Something just felt a little unbalanced. And I'm not sure I entirely understood what happened at the end. The obliqueness again.
But this is a very impressive not-perfect book. I’m looking forward to whatever the next one is.
Read
September 7, 2020A heart-breaking Irish family drama but one for which I cannot provide a rating.
Brothers Cormac and Hart face decisions no sons or family should have to make. The plot is complex but interspersed with wonderful Irish wit , which meant it did not always feel so overwhelming. A nuanced novel dealing with abandonment, sacrifice, and hardships; underscored by family and relationships.
As I think I missed some of the importance of both Irish history and the subtlety of local culture, I’d prefer not to rate the read! With more knowledge and understanding it would be a great read!
Brothers Cormac and Hart face decisions no sons or family should have to make. The plot is complex but interspersed with wonderful Irish wit , which meant it did not always feel so overwhelming. A nuanced novel dealing with abandonment, sacrifice, and hardships; underscored by family and relationships.
As I think I missed some of the importance of both Irish history and the subtlety of local culture, I’d prefer not to rate the read! With more knowledge and understanding it would be a great read!
did-not-finish
August 16, 2020A third of the way in, I’ve abandoned it. Such strong writing, but I am one of those uncool readers that bails on a book because I hate all of the characters. So that’s what I did.
October 2, 2020
4.5* I’m going to sit on the fence as I can’t decide a rating. Really loved the writing and mostly loved but had some issues with a few parts of the story line.
July 31, 2020
This grew on me. While the quality of the writing is immediately evident, it took some time for me to be drawn you in.
It appears that was also, or mainly, the fault of the audiofile which - frustratingly - didn't have the chapters in the right order.
So please be careful if you purchase this on audible...
The Irish narration was beautiful though!
It appears that was also, or mainly, the fault of the audiofile which - frustratingly - didn't have the chapters in the right order.
So please be careful if you purchase this on audible...
The Irish narration was beautiful though!
September 9, 2021
I find it hard to believe a woman wrote this book, if you told me that Jonathan Franzen had written this I would absolutely 100% believe you with no questions asked. The women in this book are so poorly written. I would have DNFed except I was enjoying Chris O'Dowd's narration of the audiobook. 2.5 stars, I can't hang with unlikeable characters doing foolish things even if the author does handle them with kid gloves.
August 24, 2020
This was another fine effort from Caoilinn Hughes whose Orchid & the Wasp I loved. The Wild Laughter was a bit more sober (though plenty of dark humor)in overall tone and topic, but shines with Hughes skill in prose and specific vision that I admire. Hughes does not simply shock the reader; she directly challenges them. Here she does so first by giving her sympathetic narrator a misogynistic streak, then getting very close to the line where opacity becomes unintelligibility, but IMO still manages to pull off a triumph of a novel at the end. Keep it up Caoilinn. I look forward to the next book.
June 25, 2020
The Wild Laughter is Caoilinn Hughes's follow up to The Orchid and the Wasp which was, for my money, the most complex and beguiling Celtic Tiger novel. This one is a big contrast - where The Orchid and The Wasp was a colourful novel about hope and good fortune set in Dublin and New York, The Wild Laughter is a dowdy novel set in dowdy County Roscommon. Is it just coincidence that this was John McGahern's setting for his loosely autobiographical The Barracks?
We have a village. We have a farm. We have Doharty (Hart) Black about to inherit the farm from his mother Nora and his terminally ill father Manus, known affectionately as The Chief. Hart feels stuck. He has no great interest in farming and is envious of his brother Cormac who has escaped to town and gets to hang out with the arty crowd. Hart apparently got the looks and Cormac got the brains - and he doesn't think this was a fair trade.
The farm is not healthy. It wasn't ever quite clear, but it seems the family made some poor investments that were wiped out when the Celtic Tiger collapsed. There's a sense that the Blacks are collateral damage while they imagine the financiers and dealmakers have survived. This feels like a significant evolution from the pastoral feel of McGahern's novels. But how far is this really new? Couldn't a parallel be made to the devastating impact of An Gorta Mor, driving tenant farmers broke while the landlords seemed to have got away unscathed? Couldn't Cormac be seen as an emigrant, fleeing the land for the prospect of a brighter life?
But having set up the novel to be one thing, its focus seems to slide. First of all, we have a story of sibling rivalry over women. And then we have a story about assisted dying complete with a courtroom potboiler. The pace changes wildly between these different focuses - towards the end each successive chapter could almost have come from a different novel. It is unconventional, it's a bit distracting, but it also lifts this above a McGahern wannabe.
Caoilinn Hughes can certainly write - probably in two languages. There were plenty of phrases as Gaeilge that were not translated into English. I got some of them from my basic knowledge of Scottish Gaidhlig, but a lot of it went over my head. I suspect the novel is highly referential on an academic level (characters' names, for example, are not chosen at random; a couple are spelled out but the others have meanings too). Sometimes, though, a novel can be too clever. The Achilles Heel in The Wild Laughter is that the crucial plot developments are written in such an oblique way that it is hard to be sure exactly what has happened. By all means invite readers to read between clever lines for small points of detail, but when the main thrust of the story is dissipated in this way it can be so frustrating.
Overall, there's enough in The Wild Laughter to be readable, thought provoking and occasionally fun. The narrative angle is quirky and scenes of farmyard raids (links to Ribbonism?) are fun. But a more consistent narrative drive and clearer language in parts could have made this truly great.
We have a village. We have a farm. We have Doharty (Hart) Black about to inherit the farm from his mother Nora and his terminally ill father Manus, known affectionately as The Chief. Hart feels stuck. He has no great interest in farming and is envious of his brother Cormac who has escaped to town and gets to hang out with the arty crowd. Hart apparently got the looks and Cormac got the brains - and he doesn't think this was a fair trade.
The farm is not healthy. It wasn't ever quite clear, but it seems the family made some poor investments that were wiped out when the Celtic Tiger collapsed. There's a sense that the Blacks are collateral damage while they imagine the financiers and dealmakers have survived. This feels like a significant evolution from the pastoral feel of McGahern's novels. But how far is this really new? Couldn't a parallel be made to the devastating impact of An Gorta Mor, driving tenant farmers broke while the landlords seemed to have got away unscathed? Couldn't Cormac be seen as an emigrant, fleeing the land for the prospect of a brighter life?
But having set up the novel to be one thing, its focus seems to slide. First of all, we have a story of sibling rivalry over women. And then we have a story about assisted dying complete with a courtroom potboiler. The pace changes wildly between these different focuses - towards the end each successive chapter could almost have come from a different novel. It is unconventional, it's a bit distracting, but it also lifts this above a McGahern wannabe.
Caoilinn Hughes can certainly write - probably in two languages. There were plenty of phrases as Gaeilge that were not translated into English. I got some of them from my basic knowledge of Scottish Gaidhlig, but a lot of it went over my head. I suspect the novel is highly referential on an academic level (characters' names, for example, are not chosen at random; a couple are spelled out but the others have meanings too). Sometimes, though, a novel can be too clever. The Achilles Heel in The Wild Laughter is that the crucial plot developments are written in such an oblique way that it is hard to be sure exactly what has happened. By all means invite readers to read between clever lines for small points of detail, but when the main thrust of the story is dissipated in this way it can be so frustrating.
Overall, there's enough in The Wild Laughter to be readable, thought provoking and occasionally fun. The narrative angle is quirky and scenes of farmyard raids (links to Ribbonism?) are fun. But a more consistent narrative drive and clearer language in parts could have made this truly great.
June 26, 2020
It's a shame that the description on the cover is so vague and doesn't really tell what the book is about, because I probably wouldn't have read it if I hadn't heard really good things about it and for it being written by a young female writer from Ireland.
This book is excellent! It's about euthanasia, family, love and it's written in such a sensitive, beautiful, original way. Plus the cover looks really nice :-)
Thank you One World and Edelweiss for the ARC
This book is excellent! It's about euthanasia, family, love and it's written in such a sensitive, beautiful, original way. Plus the cover looks really nice :-)
Thank you One World and Edelweiss for the ARC
January 2, 2025
I feel like I've been knocked out by a literary heavyweight punch. Unflinching. Powerful. Sibling rivalry. Older, brawny, brainy brother, Cormac - "he wasn't imaginative - he was a ledger" and handsome, charming, aptly named brother Hart, "who had the emotions of every girl in County Roscommon over a barrel." A dying father. The family farm in foreclosure. An Irish Cain and Abel.
Thank you Carolyn, for this well chosen, stunning Christmas gift of a read. This young, Irish author, Caoilinn Hughes, has two other novels, so far, that I’ll surely be reading.
"We never needed hope to keep us going, keep us drinking. We never needed promises or prospects like the Yanks. No, no. What we could not be without is laughter – the thing austerity couldn't touch. Oh ho, the wild laughter."
Thank you Carolyn, for this well chosen, stunning Christmas gift of a read. This young, Irish author, Caoilinn Hughes, has two other novels, so far, that I’ll surely be reading.
"We never needed hope to keep us going, keep us drinking. We never needed promises or prospects like the Yanks. No, no. What we could not be without is laughter – the thing austerity couldn't touch. Oh ho, the wild laughter."
May 31, 2021
Loved this.
July 21, 2020
All the perks and perils of being a part of a family are unearthed within this darkly humorous and heartbreakingly poignant novel, played out against a back drop of a rural Ireland held fast within the grips of a massive recession. Hart might have been blessed with the looks in his family but he’s always lived in the shadow of his older brother Cormac – bigger, tougher, and cunningly smarter. For Cormac, college and beyond; for Hart, unemployment disguised as helping out on the farm, a life he neither asked for nor desires. But Cormac is a bully and a thug, and it suits him to be the big man out and about while his younger brother takes care of the home front.
‘Beneath the surface of my brother’s glassy expression was a smirk like a large trout that might surface fleetingly for a hatch of mayflies. Even if it didn’t, you could tell it was there all along: a dark, slithering scorn, full of small bones that somebody, someday, would swallow.’
Hard hit by the recession and swindled in a property development wrought, the family is barely holding it together financially when Chief (the father of the story) is cut down with what is presumed to be cancer – he doesn’t go for tests or treatments, partly because he can’t afford it (the money or the time away from the farm) and partly because there is little point: he’s dying anyway, why pay someone to tell him and prolong it. Here we see the true measure of Hart versus Cormac; Cormac stays away, turning up just enough to bask under his mother’s beam of adoration but not enough to actually contribute. Hart is there for everything; the work his father can’t do, the cleaning up his mother won’t do, and to witness the death of not just his father’s body, but his dignity. Over and over we see the many ways in which this man was brought low by an illness he was never going to survive. Hart’s love for his father was a beautiful but painful thing to regard.
‘The measure of love I had for him was not unlike the riz biscuits, in the awkward uncontainable way that made it wise to push the batch of it aside and start over for fear of being poisoned by too much swelling.’
I kept thinking that there was more to Nora, their mother, than what we were initially let in on. Depths that she perhaps was keeping contained, a painful past that had her stitched up. But in the end, I realised she was nothing more than who she was: a woman who would comfortably throw one son under the bus for the other if it meant for assurances of her own comfort and protection. If Hart was his father’s son then Cormac was his mother’s and this was evident over and above everything else. Nora’s strangeness wasn’t a front for hidden depths, she was just a strange woman full stop. Just as Cormac was a tosser through and through.
‘Right from the outset, from his first interview he’d been building his case … and it wasn’t against the People. Maybe he took it for granted I’d do the same: set myself against him. How far back had he contrived my incrimination?’
Perhaps this withholding of motherly affection and lack of normal mother-son interactions could account for the way in which Hart related to women. He seemed to always be straddling a violent line. It wasn’t explored too deeply, but the hint of it was enough to ground Hart as a character, take him down a peg or two lest we all become too enamoured with him. Likewise, the whole dog thing; the author was again reinforcing the flawed part of Hart’s character, giving us a reason to be repelled by him. And yet, in a way that only the best authors can achieve, these flaws only make you care for Hart more deeply by the end: the betrayed brother, the son cast out; the one to take the fall and bear the burden of his father’s choice because he was the only one pure enough, good enough, to do so.
‘Father Shaughnessy agreed that honesty was my biggest strength and my weakness. Too much honesty is incompatible with this world. It is water poured onto droughted soil. It can only spill off. The earth is too rigid in its poverty to absorb what wealth is given.’
For me, reading this novel was akin to watching waves breaking on the shore, the momentum building as you wade deeper, knowing that you will be in for a drenching but the shock of that final wave, once it at last hits, still managing to leave you shredded to pieces, despite all the warning signs guiding you to the finish.
Thanks is extended to Bloomsbury for providing me with a copy of The Wild Laughter for review.
‘Beneath the surface of my brother’s glassy expression was a smirk like a large trout that might surface fleetingly for a hatch of mayflies. Even if it didn’t, you could tell it was there all along: a dark, slithering scorn, full of small bones that somebody, someday, would swallow.’
Hard hit by the recession and swindled in a property development wrought, the family is barely holding it together financially when Chief (the father of the story) is cut down with what is presumed to be cancer – he doesn’t go for tests or treatments, partly because he can’t afford it (the money or the time away from the farm) and partly because there is little point: he’s dying anyway, why pay someone to tell him and prolong it. Here we see the true measure of Hart versus Cormac; Cormac stays away, turning up just enough to bask under his mother’s beam of adoration but not enough to actually contribute. Hart is there for everything; the work his father can’t do, the cleaning up his mother won’t do, and to witness the death of not just his father’s body, but his dignity. Over and over we see the many ways in which this man was brought low by an illness he was never going to survive. Hart’s love for his father was a beautiful but painful thing to regard.
‘The measure of love I had for him was not unlike the riz biscuits, in the awkward uncontainable way that made it wise to push the batch of it aside and start over for fear of being poisoned by too much swelling.’
I kept thinking that there was more to Nora, their mother, than what we were initially let in on. Depths that she perhaps was keeping contained, a painful past that had her stitched up. But in the end, I realised she was nothing more than who she was: a woman who would comfortably throw one son under the bus for the other if it meant for assurances of her own comfort and protection. If Hart was his father’s son then Cormac was his mother’s and this was evident over and above everything else. Nora’s strangeness wasn’t a front for hidden depths, she was just a strange woman full stop. Just as Cormac was a tosser through and through.
‘Right from the outset, from his first interview he’d been building his case … and it wasn’t against the People. Maybe he took it for granted I’d do the same: set myself against him. How far back had he contrived my incrimination?’
Perhaps this withholding of motherly affection and lack of normal mother-son interactions could account for the way in which Hart related to women. He seemed to always be straddling a violent line. It wasn’t explored too deeply, but the hint of it was enough to ground Hart as a character, take him down a peg or two lest we all become too enamoured with him. Likewise, the whole dog thing; the author was again reinforcing the flawed part of Hart’s character, giving us a reason to be repelled by him. And yet, in a way that only the best authors can achieve, these flaws only make you care for Hart more deeply by the end: the betrayed brother, the son cast out; the one to take the fall and bear the burden of his father’s choice because he was the only one pure enough, good enough, to do so.
‘Father Shaughnessy agreed that honesty was my biggest strength and my weakness. Too much honesty is incompatible with this world. It is water poured onto droughted soil. It can only spill off. The earth is too rigid in its poverty to absorb what wealth is given.’
For me, reading this novel was akin to watching waves breaking on the shore, the momentum building as you wade deeper, knowing that you will be in for a drenching but the shock of that final wave, once it at last hits, still managing to leave you shredded to pieces, despite all the warning signs guiding you to the finish.
Thanks is extended to Bloomsbury for providing me with a copy of The Wild Laughter for review.
August 6, 2020
It takes a special writer to make a story of assisted suicide and the 2008 recession engaging and witty, but that is exactly what Hughes has pulled off in this memorable novel.
Its about a Roscommon farming family; brothers Cormac and Doharty 'Hart' Black and their father, the Chief, who is dying from terminal cancer. All have worked themselves to the bone to pay off debts in the wake of poor financial investments during the Celtic Tiger.
How can these things make you smile? The answer lies is the autheticity of the language Hughes uses. This strength, is also to a degree the novel's weakness, in that it takes some getting into. Having finished, I want to go back and read the first half again because I think I would get more out of it.
The plot is of less importance, in fact the tension she has worked so hard to create falls apart somewhat in the last chapters, at the expense of flashbacks and anecdotes; the father’s posthumous presence eclipses the proceedings of the courtroom - these character interactions are why the novel works so well.
All in all, it is a sharp and quick-witted depiction of fatherhood and pathos, one that is bravely told and tenderly constructed.
It will certainly feature as one of my best books of the year, which could make it a hat-trick for Irish writers, following on from Kevin Barry and Jess Kidd in the last two years.
Here's a snippet..
Its about a Roscommon farming family; brothers Cormac and Doharty 'Hart' Black and their father, the Chief, who is dying from terminal cancer. All have worked themselves to the bone to pay off debts in the wake of poor financial investments during the Celtic Tiger.
How can these things make you smile? The answer lies is the autheticity of the language Hughes uses. This strength, is also to a degree the novel's weakness, in that it takes some getting into. Having finished, I want to go back and read the first half again because I think I would get more out of it.
The plot is of less importance, in fact the tension she has worked so hard to create falls apart somewhat in the last chapters, at the expense of flashbacks and anecdotes; the father’s posthumous presence eclipses the proceedings of the courtroom - these character interactions are why the novel works so well.
All in all, it is a sharp and quick-witted depiction of fatherhood and pathos, one that is bravely told and tenderly constructed.
It will certainly feature as one of my best books of the year, which could make it a hat-trick for Irish writers, following on from Kevin Barry and Jess Kidd in the last two years.
Here's a snippet..
..a Lego-headed fella with hooded eyes, enjoying the baton swinging by his hip, and a disconsolate looking middle-aged ban-garda with a few red highlights poking out under her cap and a large continuous bosom and stomach that was kept at bay by her anti-stab vest.
January 3, 2021
This was a great story, ruined in the retelling by Chris O'Dowd's reading of it. In fairness to Mr. O'Dowd, I blame the production team for letting his many misprononciations of words go uncorrected and his frequent misinterpretation of nuance allowed to slide. Do not listen to the version on Borrowbox read by Chris O'Dowd, he's an actor not a reader and an actor with no director on this performance.
May 8, 2021
one of the best depictions of irish life we've ever come up with in our long literary history. give hughes all the prizes, she has an ear for voices and turns a phrase like no one else: genius.
February 26, 2021
It is 2008 and the rise and fall of the beast that was the Celtic tiger has left devastation and recession in its wake. One family that has been affected by it are the Blacks. They live on a farm in County Roscommon and the investments that they made while the markets were on the up have gone sour, whilst the people that they have invested with seem to have survived, they are holding the losses.
The family are Manus or Chief as he is better known, his wife, Nora and their sons, Cormac and Hart. There is a tension between the brothers as they both have affections for the same girl. Cormac has managed to escape to the city and university and Hart is seen as the natural successor to take over the farm. That moment is approaching soon though as Manus falls ill. He knows he is dying and springs a request onto the brothers that will place them in an untenable position…
In amongst all the bleakness and tension of the story though there is dry humour. I think that some of the subtleties of the plot washed over me, it harks back to the time when the Irish were oppressed and had to flee from their homeland, but set in the context of a small family facing a challenging time. She has a beautiful way of writing though, and even though it covers some challenging plot tropes, it was a pleasure to read.
The family are Manus or Chief as he is better known, his wife, Nora and their sons, Cormac and Hart. There is a tension between the brothers as they both have affections for the same girl. Cormac has managed to escape to the city and university and Hart is seen as the natural successor to take over the farm. That moment is approaching soon though as Manus falls ill. He knows he is dying and springs a request onto the brothers that will place them in an untenable position…
In amongst all the bleakness and tension of the story though there is dry humour. I think that some of the subtleties of the plot washed over me, it harks back to the time when the Irish were oppressed and had to flee from their homeland, but set in the context of a small family facing a challenging time. She has a beautiful way of writing though, and even though it covers some challenging plot tropes, it was a pleasure to read.
July 26, 2020
4.5 stars. A very very good novel. Couldn’t quite give it 5 as I struggled through parts of it, but the last few chapters definitely tempted me. Also this is my last read for the Reading Rush and it became a bit of a slog for me, which is in no way a reflection on the quality of this book. I will reread this when I am not forcing myself to finish it in two days - lol.
I’d be very surprised if this wasn’t longlisted for the Booker this year. Not that I’m a huge follower or fan of the prize, but it just screams literary prize catnip to me. At first I was getting very strong Milkman vibes, and there are indeed comparisons. But this was not as stylized as Milkman and was pretty compulsively readable after the first few chapters.
Also, reading this makes me want to go back to her debut novel, The Orchid & the Wasp, which I can recall enjoying at the time, but not quite ‘getting’. In reading this, I kept thinking back to that reading experience, quite vividly recalling some moments, but not the plot entirely.
Hughes is a talent for sure. Read this book, guys!
I’d be very surprised if this wasn’t longlisted for the Booker this year. Not that I’m a huge follower or fan of the prize, but it just screams literary prize catnip to me. At first I was getting very strong Milkman vibes, and there are indeed comparisons. But this was not as stylized as Milkman and was pretty compulsively readable after the first few chapters.
Also, reading this makes me want to go back to her debut novel, The Orchid & the Wasp, which I can recall enjoying at the time, but not quite ‘getting’. In reading this, I kept thinking back to that reading experience, quite vividly recalling some moments, but not the plot entirely.
Hughes is a talent for sure. Read this book, guys!
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